Advancing Business Competitiveness of Rural Entrepreneurs: a digital repository of training opportunities for young farmers
On September 2020, the Erasmus+ National Agency in Bulgaria communicated the approval of the YOUNG FARMERS – Rural Entrepreneurship Leveraging Advanced training for Young farmers proposal, under the KA2 Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices – Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training.
The project officially kick-started in mid-December with the first online transnational meeting during which partners had the great opportunity to refine and review the activities, deliverables and outcomes of the project as originally planned during proposal.
One of the very first activity was the development, testing and implementation of the Open Educational Resource Platform: the main showcase of project’s results and its greatest and most tangible channel for international visibility. The OER Platform is available in five languages (EN, BG, IT, ES, PL) and all of its content is fully available for free, with no sort of log-in / identification required from the user.
For the next two years, the Platform will host and mainstream all major Partnership’s achievements; each section of the OER Platform is a stand-alone library of its corresponding output.
The “Mapping” section will be the repository of the country reports elaborated by partners during the first half of 2021. Each country report (one for every nation represented by the Partners – at exception of Belgium: the Belgian Partner IHF will be responsible for the International and pan-European analysis of the phenomenon) is an in-depth analysis of socio-economic dynamics both threatening and enhancing young farmers’ competitiveness. The analysis will bring out to light specific needs / empowerment opportunities that the Partnership will address through the development, testing and validation of dedicated training material – fully available for free, with no kind of limitation for its access. The educational resources will be published on “Toolkits”. The “Guidelines” sections will host two very important documents: guidelines to promote the uptake of project results and deliverables beyond the scope of the partnership and the scale of the project; a Policy Memo collecting all the lessons learned acquired at implementation and consolidating the wealth of knowledge on the dynamics of digital and ICT tools applied to farming entrepreneurship from an operational perspective.
Strategically relevant for the widespread impact of the project is also the “Associates” section: stakeholders in the domain of rural entrepreneurship, primary sector, agribusiness, etc., will be able to join the community of practice of YOUNG FARMERS; they will remain updated on project activities, news and deliverables.
The role of the CIRCLE foundation in the project is to implement all tasks. This includes mapping, development, testing of training solutions. CIRCLE is actively involved in dissemination actions to spread information and promote uptake of solutions developed and of all other project results.
For further information on YOUNG FARMERS and other CIRCLE initiatives:
https://www.fundacjacircle.eu/
